Teaching Common Sense

How is critical thinking taught? How will the next generation cope with an ever-changing and increasingly complex world?

These are questions that the Grand Strategy program at Yale seeks to address. The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy seeks to revive the study and practice of grand strategy by devising methods to teach that subject at the graduate and undergraduate levels, by training future leaders to think about and implement grand strategies in imaginative and effective ways, and by organizing public events that emphasize the importance of grand strategy.

The program defines “grand strategy” as a comprehensive plan of action, based on the calculated relationship of means to large ends.

Never an exact science, grand strategy requires constant reassessment and adjustment. Flexibility is key. Traditionally believed to belong to and best-developed in the politico-military and governmental realms, the concept of grand strategy applies—and ISS believes